A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, well in the United States in 1977, a movie that would start of one of the world’s biggest franchises opened for the first time. Under very little promotion and mainly word of mouth, more and more people flocked to the cinema until there were long lines of queues around the block of the cinema. The film was such a surprise hit that it had to be moved to bigger and more venues just to accommodate everyone that wanted to watch it. It then took seven months to reach the UK and parts of Europe and some countries had to wait even longer.
Nearly four decades later, the release of the seventh film in the franchise last year couldn’t have been more different. The film was well known to be one of the biggest movie franchises already, and now Star Wars is part of the huge world of Disney it was only going to get bigger. Whilst normally any big movie like this would open in cinemas around the United States before anywhere else in the world, this wasn’t the case for The Force Awakens. The movie was released in some countries around Europe a day before it was released in the US. This meant that some diehard American fans that couldn’t bear to wait another 24 hours flew from America to Paris to be part of one of the world’s first screenings of the film.
As well as those diehard fans who had been waiting years for a new film in the franchise, there were a lot of people for who The Force Awakens would be the first Stars Wars film they would see. Wherever you looked around the world, it seemed like everyone was talking about their favorite moments from the past films as well as what to expect from the new ones. In Australia, the excitement was so widespread that even casino website Euro Palace’s blog created a cooler cheat sheet. The blog on the Euro Palace site has all the main events of the franchise broken down into a few paragraphs, so anybody who didn’t know the story of Star Wars could quickly brush up on what they needed to know.
Now Disney owns the film franchise, the excitement for the film rapidly built in the months and even years before the film’s release. Whenever JJ Abrams gave us a glimpse of the new film, the world’s media went wild. But it wasn’t just the internet and sites like Euro Palace where the world went wild for Star Wars. In shops and supermarkets around the world, there weren’t many places where you could walk into and not find something with a Star Wars character on. So much so that it’s expected thatDisney will make more money from their official merchandise alone than the actual film. One thing for sure is that the film is so big that wherever you are in the world, you could walk up to someone and it’s more than likely that they will have seen the film.
